32 & L J t l j t 4 "Continue playi11g wzth the ball.)) . uses books the way Laplanders use rein- deer (for food, shelter, ornament, and transportation), was feeling the way Scotland felt after the return of the Stone of Scone. Guests-familiar faces included Joe L'lsh, the Hentoffs, Michael HarrIng- ton (the writer, not the Congress- man), the poet Richard Howard, and Ilnam u Baraka, who arrived with his wife and some free copies of the Mao mell10rial issue of Unity & Struggle, the political organ of the Revolution- arv Communist League (the front- page headline began "LONG LIVE IN- VINCIBLE MARXISM-LENINISM-11AO TSE-TUNG THOUGHT! lONG L[VE TIlE GREAT, GLORIOUS AND COR- RECT COMMUNIST PARTY OF CHI- 1\A! ")-stood about with either drinks or hooks in their hands, and the writers among theln talked shup. A Times re- porter said happily that the paper's new six-column format means that page- one story leads can be longer and more informative and that the Times copy desk is now, for the fì rst time, passing discursive, relaxed sentences. A mclga- zine editor who had organized a team for the annual New York Publishers' Suftb.:lll League in Central Park this sumlner talked about the writer he had asked to play nght field. The writer had inquired, "\V ould that be stage 1 ight or audience right?" The bookstore itself looks better than ever. It has new strip lighting on the ceiling, and new, roomier display shelves on the floor, which were de- s;gned by Wilentz himself, and the stock has been rearranged (literature . on the mezzanine and social studies on the second floor )-a move that \Vi- lentz admits he had been contemplat- ing for some time before the fire but had been too lazy to make Eli \Vilentz started the Eighth Street twenty-nine years ago, when he was himself twenty- nine. The idea was to give the Village a Gotham Book Mart In the fifties, the store became the major outlet in the city for the Beat poets and also the first store to catch on to quality paper- backs and stock them heavily. In 1967, the store moved across the street from its original quarters, when \Vilentz bought the town house where Texas Guinan had once had an apartment. He says he was never able to find the gold bathtub she was supposed to have installed. He converted the first three floors into a store, and left the top two floors divided into apartments, one of which his daughter Eileen now occu- pies. (He himself lives, with his wife, Jean, in Brooklyn Heights.) In the early years, the store ran a lending li- brary, and \V. H. Auden checked out each new Nicholas Blake (C. Day Lewis) mystery title-fifteen cents for three days-hecause, he said, it W'lS the only way he could keep up with local English gossip. Marianne Moore was a regular, and so was E. E. Cummings, who lived on Patchin Place, off Sixth Avenue. His Patchin Place neighbor D juna Barnes still drops by the store from time to time. Dick Barnett, of the Knicks, bought business books there when he was taking husiness-manage- ment courses at N.Y. D., and Kareem Abdul- J abbar once came into the store, ........ banging his head on the door \Vilentz, in his upstairs office, has a copy of the autobiography of Jinichi D ekusa, the WrIter the J a pan e s e consider to be the most reliable reporter on American and European trends. The book sold fifty-five thousand copies in Japan, and its frontispiece is a color photograph of the author wearing a red-and-white Eighth Street Bookshop T-shirt. Two years ago, another buokstore opened up next door and started cutting into thf Eighth Street's business by selling all hardcover books at thIrty per cent off. But last year the Eighth Street fol- lowed suit, and it was just pulling even when the fire hit. Wilentz is a cheerful man with the face of a reformed Pan, who smokes sma]] cigars and Serves as a member of the New York City Art Commis- sion, the body that must approve the design of any new municipal building and the purchase of any art or sculpture by the city. \Ve approached him to wish him the best, and had to wait in line while a New School teacher told him that the hardcover philosophy sec- tion was inadequate ("Where's Mer- leau-Ponty? ") and a young Ben- nington grad said, "I'm glad you're open-you're the only store that gives me credit. The first time I came in, I opened my wallet to show identifica- tion, and the salescleI k saw I had a picture of J ulius Lester, the novelist, and said, 'Any friend of Julius Lester's . OKb ,,, IS . . Y us. \Vilentz invited us upstairs to his daughter Eileen's apartment for a fam- ily post-restaur at ion em champagne par- ty. Eileen, a Bennington grad herself, with an M.A. in English history from Columbia, now manages the store. There are tW{) other Wilen tz chil- dren-Philip, a Columbia undergrad, who also works in the store, and Sean, who is a grad student in history at Yale writing a Ph.D. thesis on New York artisans and labor from 1815 to 1850. Wilentz and his wife entered Eileen's to applause. Wilentz said, "I was never interested in just being in business. If the store couldn't be here, I didn't want it. There have always been kind of two aspects to this place-one a center for writers, the other pure busi- ness. The trick is to combine the two. I thought serIously about not reopening after the fire, but Eileen and Phil wanted it, and a lot of people either stopped by or sent notes enclosing small checks, and the publishers have all been very nice about extending credit, and- well, it feels good to be back, and we intend to stay around for some time I wonder how much business we lost by closing the store for the party."